Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novel, Diving Into the Wreck, appeared to great critical acclaim from Pyr Books in November of last year. The next Diving novel, City of Ruin, will be out in spring of 2011. Recently, Golden Gryphon published a collection of her newest award-winning and award-nominated tales, Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories, and the website io9 declared her Retrieval Artist series one of the ten best science fiction detective stories ever published. The author’s eerie new tale from her Diving universe reveals the secret of . . .

They landed smoothly, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here—all five hundred of them, mostly in one piece.
For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week. Then he raised his head and looked.
The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot. A lot that he didn’t understand.
The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.
The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She housed five hundred people comfortably, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way. Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas. The Sector Base was huge and impossible to process all at once.
But what Coop could process looked wrong.